In a speech on Saturday morning, US President Donald Trump framed the attack he launched on Iran as commander-in-chief not as an act of aggression, but as an act of defense. He presented it as a move designed to protect Americans and America’s future, according to his own public case.
For Trump, global public opinion matters, and above all, public opinion at home in the United States. That is why his language was aimed first at Americans, not at allies.
Diplomacy as due diligence
Many have asked why Trump “wasted time” on attempts at negotiations and indirect talks in recent months. The answer is not rooted in genuine hope for an agreement but in building legitimacy, primarily at home.
Trump understands that Iran is geographically distant from the average voter in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Texas. To take America into a campaign, he needed to show he had exhausted every last crumb of diplomacy, a point reflected in the public buildup around the latest round of US-Iran talks and warnings of escalation.
Unlike Barack Obama, for whom negotiations were the ultimate goal, Trump treated negotiations as a basic “sanity check,” a form of due diligence. The talks were not the destination, they were the paperwork.
A ledger of grievances
In his address, Trump presented a long list of actions he described as “acts of war” against the American people. He did not stop at the nuclear issue, instead rewinding the story to 1979, the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, and the hostage crisis.
He also cited the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, where 241 American servicemen were killed, and a string of additional attacks carried out, he said, by Iran or its proxies. He even included the killing of US citizens in the October 7, 2023 attacks, an issue highlighted in reporting on American victims and hostages.
This is why he framed the moment as time to settle accounts. In his telling, he is not going to war; he is answering a war already waged against Americans.
Israel is not the headline in Washington
It is worth noting how little Trump mentioned the threat to Israel in his speech. The framing was more clearly signaled by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who spoke of Iran’s missile pathway in terms that pointed beyond the region.
The message was that Washington is speaking first to Americans. Israel may be central to the region’s reality, but it is not the centerpiece of Trump’s public justification.
America First, even when it helps Israel
If there is something we should learn from Trump’s conduct, especially when we assume he is “always on our side,” it is this: yes, he supports us, but his commitment is first and foremost to the American people. He promised them “America First,” and he has remained faithful to that pledge.
That is why he did not go to war to rescue Iranian protesters and why he did not strike simply because Israel wanted it, even at Netanyahu’s request. In this worldview, Israel may open a chapter, but Trump insists on controlling how, and how long, the American chapter is written.
So in his speech, he was speaking above all to the American in Ohio and the American in Texas, telling them that chants of “Death to America” are not distant noise but a real threat to their security. From Trump’s perspective, this is not the opening of a war but the closing of an account with a regime that humiliated America and threatens America’s future and the world’s.
And the timing is so symbolic that it feels like poetic justice. The Jewish people, who remember Haman declaring his desire to destroy the Jews, are now helping the United States and the Iranian people confront a modern-day Haman whose rallying cry remains: “Death to America.”